Thursday, October 28, 2010

God Designed My Great-Grandparents

On the thread Impossible Molecular Machines we are being treated to a lesson in probabilities from several creationists. Here's an example of a comment from Livingstone Morford.

By Darwinism I mean the notion that everything we observe in the biological world are purely the result of stochastic processes, and I am critical of that notion.

On a different topic, I might add that intelligent design proponents need only demonstrate that the odds of a particular biochemical system evolving are 10^-40 or less in order for intelligent design to be a more adequate explanation for the origin of such a biochemical system. This is because there have been no more than 10^39 bacterial cells in the history of life on earth.

Speaking of stochastic processes, the average number of sperm contributed by a man in a mating process is 100,000,000 (108). That means that every single human is the product of a single sperm cell uniting with a single egg cell and the probability that one particular sperm was successful is 10-8.

This probability of existence applies to each of my great-grandparents.

Johann Betker was born in 1859 in Volhynia in the western part of Ukraine. The probability that he was produced from a particular sperm cell is 10-8. His future wife, Amalie Schmuland, was born in 1868, also in Volynia. This was also an improbable event from the point of view of sperm selection. The probability that BOTH of my grandparents were born is (at least): 10-8 × 10-8 = 10-16.

The same probabilities apply to Thomas Keys Foster born 1852 in country Tyrone, Ireland and his wife Eliza Ann Job born 1852 in country Tyrone. Their two births were very lucky with a total probability of only 10-16. Now, if you combine all four of these great-grandparents you end up with a probability of 10-32. Add in the other four great-grandparents and you end up with the total probability that all eight of these individuals would be born = 10-64. (The real probabilities are much, much lower when you take the eggs into account.)

Since this total probability is a lot less than the total number of bacteria that have ever existed, it follows that God must have intervened somewhere. Two of my great-grandparents must have been designed by God. I wonder which two it was? My bet is that it wasn't any of the four mentioned above because they were all born outside of Canada. It was probably the two grand-parents who were born in Canada 'cause God likes Canadians.

Assuming that when your great-grandparents were born there were 2 billion people on Earth (nice round number - maybe there were fewer, but with the size of the numbers we're dealing with here, it soon ceases to matter), don't forget to multiply by 10^-9 (OK, 10^-9 minus 1) the probability that of all the people on Earth, your great-grandmas would choose your great-grandpas to procreate with, and vice versa. And keep doing that for every generation.

Has anybody ever calculated the probability that intelligent designers or creators would do something-or-other? After all, these designers/creators are not limited by natural laws, so they are able to do many more things than natural causes can. That means that the results that we see are a much smaller fraction of the possibilities. No matter how unlikely that things come about by mere chance, it is far less likely that designers/creators would choose that things would turn out this way. Unless, of course, someone knows about limitations on the options available to the designers/creators.

By the way, another way of getting the small probability of your having been born: Let's just take the probability that any of your ancestors would have survived to maturity as being 50%. That isn't a bad estimate, given high rates of infant mortality before modern public health, medicine and sanitation. Then make an estimate on the number of ancestors that you had per century: Let's say that you have three generations per century with 10 distinct ancestors per generation (allowing for a lot of intermarriage). Just talking about merely a thousand years, that's 300 ancestors. The chances that 300 people would all survive to maturity would be (0.5)^300, which is about 10^-100.

I like this argument because it is an example of how a complaint about evolution can be seen to apply just as well as a complaint about reproduction: An argument for Scientific Storkism.

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.